Decoherence Can Relax Cosmic Acceleration: an Example

Abstract

We investigate back reaction in de Sitter space in an approach where only states that are observationally accessible are included in the density matrix. Using the Bunch-Davies vacuum as the initial condition we find for a conformal scalar field and a cosmological constant that tracing over the unobservable states beyond the cosmological horizon leads to a thermal spectrum of particles and that such a configuration is unstable under semi-classical back reaction. It is concluded that this prescription results in an instability of de Sitter space with a gradually increasing horizon size.